1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for image feature amount acquisition and a medium recording thereon an image feature amount acquisition program, an apparatus and method for image correction and a medium recording thereon an image correcting program, and a printing apparatus and method and a medium recording thereon a printing program.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has conventionally been known a printing apparatus which enables a color ink jet printer to read from a detachable memory card and to read image data of the JPEC system recorded on the memory card and print them into color images.
In this printing apparatus, in addition to converting image data into print data, image processing to render the images more beautiful is automatically set and executed. In order to realize image processing and the like, the apparatus is provided with an image processing section besides a mechanical control section for processing mechanical processing. The image processing section, though provided with a CPU, a memory and the like, has only a small-capacity memory because of a storage capacity constraint unlike a usual personal computer.
In order to automatically set image processing, this printing apparatus samples image data of the JPEC system, after restoring them, to reduce the number of pixels and carries out statistical calculation processing. Then on the basis of the results of statistical calculation, it determines parameters of image processing, and supplies print data to the mechanical control section while restoring the image data again. Then, the mechanical control section performs color printing while appropriately controlling ink discharging from the print head, the shifting of the print head and paper feeding.
The above-described printing apparatus according to the prior art involves the following problem.
Since image processing is automatically accomplished as preliminary processing for printing, image data should be sampled after restoring them and subjected to statistical calculation processing. However, as the data are compressed by the JPEG system, they cannot be sampled without developing an equivalent of at least a prescribed number of lines into a bit map image, and the large quantity of image data which is usually encountered in recent years sometimes overflows the memory capacity.